Walter Richard Sickert 1860-1942
La Rue du Mortier d'Or, Dieppe
oil on canvas
12 x 15¾ ins
signed lower left 'Sickert'

Provenance
Jacques-Emile Blanche
Private Collection, UK

Exhibited
Roland Browse and Delbanco, London 1960, cat no. 8
Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, Sickert in Dieppe, May 31st - July 6th 1975

Literature
Wendy Baron, Sickert, Phaidon, London 1973, cat 284, fig. 201 (illustrated)



By the late 1890’s, Sickert had begun to establish a solid reputation for himself in London with his depictions of the music halls and stage performers. But with his marriage to Ellen Cobden foundering and the loss of a libel action to Joseph Pennell over an article Sickert had written in The Sunday Review in December 1896, a change of venue must have seemed appealing. For the next decade, Sickert was to spend most of his time between Venice and Dieppe and in these two very different cities he was to create two very different bodies of work.

Almost all the paintings produced in Dieppe are of a topographical nature with the human figure generally appearing in the guise of figures in the streets. Several of the well-known landmarks of the town feature again and again in the paintings - perhaps most frequently the church of St. Jaques, seen over and over again, from a multitude of different viewpoints - and have frequently drawn a comparison with the work of the Impressionist painters. However, Sickert’s manner of working, which took the same subject but treated it in many different ways does contrast strongly with the Impressionist technique of painting exactly the same view but at different times of day. Although the handling of the paint is, as here, often very free, it can seem as though much of the impetus behind the images produced was the need to free his painting from the shadow of Whistler, and correspondingly the use of a clearly delineated architectural manner moves his images far away from the elder painter’s ethereal views of the Thames.